


in defense of anguish

by mangozaya



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blood and Gore, Bloodplay, Body Horror, Codependency, Happy Early Halloween, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, based generally on mary shelley's frankenstein, chan is frankenstein's monster, hyunjin probably knows how to stitch well, not as gruesome as tags might suggest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:09:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26979364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangozaya/pseuds/mangozaya
Summary: It was Hyunjin who Chan first awoke to, when the automated humming of Changbin’s machinery drove enough electricity through Chan’s carefully crafted body—enough voltage to kill a living human, but just enough power to bring a dead monstrosity to the brink of life.
Relationships: Bang Chan/Hwang Hyunjin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	in defense of anguish

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: non-explicit bloodplay, descriptions of open wounds and frankenstein-esque body horror, please take note of tags before reading

For as often as Chan injects embalming fluid directly into his lungs, he’s never gotten used to the _burn_ of it all, washing down his throat and expanding liquid fire over every sunken crevice of his chest.

During this process—needed twice a month to keep his blood flowing no matter how viscous it builds in his veins—Chan ignores every plea from Hyunjin, every insistence that Chan can’t hurt him, that Chan could _never_ hurt him, because Chan knows better.

The concoction of preservatives being pumped into his system would disintegrate Hyunjin’s skin upon first contact, and Chan would be left with strips of flesh, coating his hands in pools of crimson blood. Hyunjin thinks Chan’s one for theaterics. Chan doesn’t want Hyunjin’s body to end up a heap on the floor, twitching in spasms of agony, unable to fend past the bulbous sores that would spread across Hyunjin’s chest, coat his throat, and liquify his brain.

They compromise with several days apart, and it feels like an eternity.

The process itself is grueling. Embalming makes him lazy, lethargic in a way that leaves him feeling useless and small, and Chan will retreat closer into himself still. The first night alone always feels more lonely than it is, despite Hyunjin lingering just beyond the door.

A week must pass before the poisonous fluid coursing through Chan’s body dissolves dead matter and decayed flesh that hangs off Chan’s frame, and he’s finally non-toxic enough for Hyunjin to press close to his side.

Chan remains silent for most of these evenings, shuddering with frantic muscle twitches of a preserved body not yet used to itself, and he’ll finally break down by night, curling into Hyunjin’s side and soaking tears into the collar of Hyunjin’s sweater. Hyunjin’s gentle during these painful hours, encompassing Chan in physical comfort, not leaving his side until dawn breaks.

“I’ve got you,” Hyunjin will whisper like clockwork every few minutes, “so let go. Let this all go.”

When he’s brave enough to pull back slightly from Hyunjin’s chest, Chan will watch as Hyunjin kisses his bruised knuckles with an overwhelming softness—Hyunjin has long stopped trying to prevent the inflammation and damage that the embalming fluid does to Chan despite simultaneously keeping him alive, and instead holds Chan through the painful aftermath—and a surge of affection rushes through Chan so strong that it threatens to topple him over, had Hyunjin not been holding on as tightly as he was.

Chan’s grown used to it all—the discolor of his sunken eyes as he gazes into a mirror that presents a body still foreign to him, the sickly tinge of his skin when he goes too long without embalming fluid, the way Chan’s stomach will lurch when his senses are aggravated with too many scents when he takes a chance on a weekly walk outdoors—and Chan doesn’t know a life without constant agony.

Chan’s starting to miss parts of a cohesive body he’s never known. A body that’s never been his.

**✰**

Chan doesn’t know much of the outside world, but he thinks he knows Hyunjin; with that, Chan’s never been one to deny Hyunjin much of anything.

Chan welcomes the rush of uncertainty as Hyunjin dips low against Chan’s chest, eyes trained at the base of his delicately stitched neck, puffy and aggravated from where Hyunjin is unraveling the thin thread keeping a fresh wound closed. Hyunjin had made quick work of it the week before, when Chan ripped his neck too far to one side as Hyunjin strode through their kitchen unannounced, arriving home earlier than normal.

(Chan had been cutting up carrots—his knife dipping too close to his fingers with every slice—but Hyunjin’s call from where he stepped into their house had jolted him out of concentration. Where he narrowly avoided slicing a finger, his neck tore with the angle his head craned at, and Chan had all but crashed onto the floor in Hyunjin’s direction.

Hyunjin had reacted quickly, dropping beside Chan and murmuring comforts into Chan’s ear as he worked a needle and thread along the seam of his neck, pulling the layer of skin together in a tight stitch, working around clots of blood long hardened with Chan’s slow cardiac rhythm, dropping stringy scraps of rotten flesh into a labeled hazard bin. The flies buzzing around Chan’s thigh didn’t understand that his skin took triple the time needed to fully heal a protective layer of dermis, and sunflower maggots took no time burrowing into Chan’s thigh, squirming in a sickening mass until Hyunjin could set a lighter close enough to Chan’s skin to ward them away with the acrid stench of burnt flesh.)

Hyunjin’s trained a sixth sense to Chan after all these years, and he brings a hand to gently cover Chan’s eyes, shielding him from the world for a moment, and Chan flutters his eyelashes against Hyunjin’s palm before closing his eyes and sighing with a staggering breath.

“Stop whatever you’re thinking for a moment, and let me take care of you.”

Hyunjin’s voice is close to the shell of Chan’s ear, the one free of a thick bolt lodged into the cavity of his ear canal, and Chan instinctively turns to hear Hyunjin’s words more clearly. It’s a habit he’s naturally picked up from his half-tuned auditory senses, and Hyunjin drops his head to smile into the crook of Chan’s neck.

Hyunjin drags his knuckles over Chan’s chest, pressing into the hollowed space where half a sternum lies underneath, and teases at a patch of broken skin that Chan’s failed to notify Hyunjin about, and Hyunjin _tsks_ loud enough for Chan to hear.

“Chan, did you not check your skin? I didn’t know about this one.”

Hyunjin presses his fist more firmly against the wound, and Chan hisses in response to the pressure.

“I didn’t realize my damn rib popped out.”

“Then let’s fix this, yeah?”

Chan doesn’t get a say in this decision, because Hyunjin is already drawing out a metal box from where his bag has been carelessly tossed on the couch beside them, and Chan watches closely as he pulls out a needle and an adhesive glue.

“Stay still for me-” Hyunjin presses a kiss to Chan’s collarbone and tucks his cheek into Chan’s neck for a moment, offering a physical comfort, “-this one might hurt, it’s rather close to your heart.”

“My heart’s been slow today, I’m not worried.”

“You place far too much trust on me,” Hyunjin hums right above his dull thudding heart.

“You’ve never given me a reason not to.”

Taking Chan’s words as consent, Hyunjin works quickly, dragging out torn skin, leathery from where Chan’s coagulated blood no longer circulates, and Hyunjin teases out this boundary between skin and muscle with a fine manicured nail as Chan barely acknowledges him with hooded eyes, only half-aware of what Hyunjin’s doing to his open wound.

Hyunjin watches Chan carefully, needle in hand but immoble in the moment, and dips his chin, eye’s carefully trained on Chan, his breath hot against Chan’s raised skin. Chan feels something warm and sticky across his chest, swiveling into the jagged cut right below his third rib, and Chan jolts suddenly, eyes wide and arms flexing against Hyunjin’s hips.

Hyunjin’s got his tongue half out, lapping around the stretch of skin that’s finely etched with the tenderness of a dull red, and Chan shudders as Hyunjin dips into the cut altogether, adhesive and needle entirely forgotten. Chan’s gone pliant under Hyunjin’s ministrations, and takes in Hyunjin’s peeking tongue, sticky with adhesive glue residue and the faint tinge of clotted blood, darkened and metallic in the open air.

Hyunjin moved upwards, nipping Chan’s collarbone with his front teeth, pressing closer as he swipes his tongue across Chan’s lower lip, staining the other with his own rotten blood, and Chan’s too caught up in Hyunjin’s darkened gaze to feel any humiliation over how responsive he is under Hyunjin, matching every twitch of Hyunjin’s hips with a frantic press of his own. His own hip bone digs sharply into Hyunjin’s thigh as he reaches forward to clumsily weave a hand through Hyunjin’s blonde hair, allowing the ends of Hyunjin’s hair to gaze across his cheekbone as Hyunjin looks down at Chan, eyes clear as daylight.

“You’re the inhuman one between us, you know that?”

Chan’s breath is ragged as he addresses Hyunjin, interlocking his fingers with Hyunjin’s own. Hyunjin drags his bloody nail against Chan’s palm and Chan feels Hyunjin _leer_ at him, his eye’s training low to Chan’s throbbing chest, splotchy crimson from his wounds.

“Baby, you _love_ it.”

At this, Chan moves on pure instinct, chasing a high he doesn’t know how to reach for, gripping Hyunjin’s shoulder hard as he tips his head backwards, exposing the expanse of his neck for Hyunjin to settle into. Hyunjin grins against him, nipping and firmly gripping his teeth around an already darkened bruise, stark against Chan’s pale skin, and Chan’s startled with his own whine, a noise that starts deep in his throat and spills over as Hyunjin grips Chan’s ashen hair and yanks _hard_.

As he grows light-headed, Chan marvels at how complicated the human diaphragm is, how Hyunjins chest rises and falls with every breath he takes, how lovely it must be to be able to inhale and exhale with ease, in the way Hyunjin does.

It’s in this way that Hyunjin kisses him, like he needs Chan to _breathe_ , like they might not have another waking second alone in the space they carved just for each other. Hyunjin braces himself against Chan, shoving him further into the couch they’ve settled into, and Chan groans into their kiss as Hyunjin handles him roughly. Chan’s self-control dips close to a tipping point as Hyunjin brings the pads of his fingers to delicately trace along Chan’s stitched eye seams.

Taking pity on Chan, Hyunjin slowly leans back, bringing his hand up to his mouth to swipe his fingers clean of Chan’s blood, a hint of glue residue and torn flesh in the lined gaps of his teeth as he flashes Chan a deranged grin, leaning down once more to tease the skin of Chan’s now-open chest wound. Chan roughly twists away, not enough to displace Hyunjin entirely from his lap, but enough for Hyunjin to sit back up, eyes flashing and lip curling, twisting Hyunjin’s face into something as terrifying as it was ethereal.

“That’s fucking _disgusting_.”

“Don’t even try to give me that-” Hyunjin spits as he grips Chan’s arm until indentations press soundly into the flesh of his pale forearm. “-give me a sign that you hate this.”

Chan’s got nothing to say to that, because while he can’t help being half-crazed in the moment, his late maker didn’t raise him a _liar_.

As Chan’s lost in his head, Hyunjin’s wrapping a hand rough around the back of Chan’s knee, and _yanks_ Chan forward, forcing out a sharp intake as he comes flush against Hyunjin’s hips. Hyunjin works soothing circles into Chan’s inner thigh, starting tender but slowly growing more steady with pressure, and it takes everything in Chan to not just arch into Hyunjin, chasing whatever heat the other has to offer. Hyunjin makes out to be composed, but there’s no mistaking the hitch deep in Hyunjin’s throat, how every murmur against Chan’s temple comes out breathless.

As suddenly as Hyunjin’s working Chan into a state of anticipation through the haze, Hyunjin grazes a hand along Chan’s chest, thumbing against every arch and rib along the way, and a sudden cold piercing brings Chan back to a semblance of clarity, and Chan’s tenses with the advance of opposing senses.

In the time it took Hyunjin to rile Chan into a worked up state, he’d slipped the stitch needle out from between his fingers with ease, and finally began to close Chan’s wound, blood drying in flaky sheets around the tough skin.

It’s maddening, how Hyunjin adjusts his hips slowly against Chan’s straining trousers while adamantly ignoring the surge of heat like static alongside them both.

“ _Fuck_ , Hyunjin,” Chan heaves out, a tremor of pleasure aching in his lower waist, confusing his body with the opposing painful stinging that’s centered against his sternum, and Hyunjin makes quick work of the needle and thread. He noses against Chan’s chin apologetically.

“I’m sorry, I needed you distracted, it’ll be over in a moment. Be good for me.”

Hyunjin leans forward again, shifting all his weight onto the expanse of Chan’s thighs, and cards a hand through Chan’s hair, humming a nonsensical tune that winds itself into the space between both of them, low and chilling.

Hyunjin’s voice reminds Chan of wind chimes, but not in the way music can be beautiful, because selective music is something that keeps Chan _alive_ ; the low thrumming of beats through his headphones are comparable to the heat of the living, warming Chan in a way that his body hasn’t experienced in decades—save for how friendship can sometimes nestle itself in Chan’s heart, or the way Hyunjin’s touch _burns_ him despite how often Hyunjin turns to him in a haze of desire—but Hyunjin’s voice only trains Chan to feel cold, chilled to his fragmented bones that have long forgotten the ability to heal themselves.

(Chan only knows how to grimace at the way his bones shift, grinding and popping beneath his almost translucent skin, but Hyunjin will drag his teeth against the metal bolts that hold together Chan’s splintered wrists, whispering into his skin that he’s beautiful, that his broken body is simply the product of time, of a process so fundamentally and scientifically fucked that Chan’s existence itself is a miracle—that Chan’s the most wonderful thing to ever come out of that mad scientist’s head—and sometimes Chan believes him.)

**✰**

Chan’s maker was a man named Changbin, and Chan has learned to curse his name with every tear track that Hyunjin trails down his delicate cheekbone, pooling into the well of his downturned lips. Hyunjin cries for Chan when he thinks Chan’s asleep, and Chan doesn’t have the heart to reach for Hyunjin and hold him close, not when Hyunjin’s tears press silent into his pillowcase, and Chan still can’t read if Hyunjin needs comfort or to be left alone. It’s taken years to understand each other, and Chan still retracts his hand when Hyunjin might need it the most.

Still, with all the depravity in Changbin’s science, no matter the hell that Changbin has brought to Chan's unwilling physical form, there’s one thing Chan will never hate of Changbin for:

Changbin’s greatest gift to Chan has always been Hyunjin.

It was Hyunjin who Chan first awoke to, when the automated humming of Changbin’s machinery drove enough electricity through Chan’s carefully crafted body—enough voltage to kill a living human, but just enough power to bring a dead monstrosity to the brink of life.

Hyunjin had held Chan’s hand, when his body was still accustoming to a sense of being _alive_. It was Hyunjin who applied a small pressure into the palm of his hand, making Chan aware of just how sensitive human touch could be. It was Hyunjin who spoke into the rippling air, loud enough for Chan’s single functioning ear to pick up language, to pick up sound and vibration and everything gentle and lovely that was wrapped into a whisper.

“He’s _beautiful_.”

Chan hasn’t forgotten Hyunjin’s first words to him for as long as he’s been among the living.

He hasn’t forgotten a single memory of Hyunjin since the moment they met.

He also hasn’t forgotten Changbin, as the man was vibrant, glowing in his pride of doing the impossible. Changbin had professed that it was _him_ who was Chan’s master. He screamed in glee that his life’s work of stringing together corpse after corpse—only after desecrating dozens of graveyards in search of intact bones and toughened skin—was all in God’s name. Changbin continued on gloating his scientific accomplishments to a room with only Hyunjin and a newly awakening Chan. Changbin planned to show the world that nothing had to have an expiration date.

Changbin never got his happy ending, but then again Chan supposes none of them deserved such a life.

Hyunjin took over as a caretaker—at least Chan supposes that might have been his title—but Hyunjin always acted as something more; he started to regard Chan as something beyond scraps of skin strewn so tight that Chan was almost immobilized in his own body. After weeks of being caged in with only Hyunjin and a few scurrying mice to keep him company, Chan started to feel something peculiar.

_Impatience._

A desire for freedom.

Hyunjin was always a few steps ahead of him.

In the dead of night, Hyunjin had grasped Chan’s hand, and whispered, “ _ru_ _n”._

Chan never thought twice, and followed Hyunjin till the day broke, and then they ran even further, far past where any human or monster could follow. They settled far into the foothills of an abandoned cottage, it’s ivy wrapping elegantly along broken windows; a structure far too beautiful for Chan’s eyes, but he’s learned to call it their home.

Without Hyunjin, Chan supposes that he might cease to exist. Hyunjin promises him safely, promises him that nothing can hurt them both within the boarded walls of their home, but Chan knows Hyunjin is just as scared as he is.

One day Changbin is going to come for them both; he is going to rip Chan apart limb-for-limb, the way nature had first intended for him. Chan knows one day his severed body is going to lay across his living room floor, torn and shredded with the fury of a wicked man who has lost everything, and Chan has no doubt that Changbin will come for Hyunjin next, cursing Hyunjin for stealing Chan away, cursing Hyunjin for falling in love with Changbin’s greatest creation, cursing Hyunjin for stealing Chan in the dead of night to be never seen again, to never be experimented on again.

Chan only wishes that he’ll get one last glimpse of Hyunjin, who is as beautiful and ethereal as every memory of the man suggests, and Chan thinks he would be content to lay down to sleep forever.

If only he is granted one last press of Hyunjin’s palm against his cheek, Hyunjin’s devotion clear in his eyes, Chan knows he’ll willingly face any hell that leads him to eternal damnation.

Changbin has never stopped searching for them both.

They’ve been hiding for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to my beta k ♡
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/izayashu)


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